The smell of old books was oddly soporific, as Hermione struggled to keep her eyes open. She felt as if they must have gone through every volume in the Restricted Section by now, but they still hadn't found anything about sailboats. Not that it could actually be about sailboats, of course, but whatever it was, they still hadn't found it yet.

Sighing, she shifted position, and her knuckles brushed against Luna's. Luna looked up from her position crouched in front of the shelves, smiled brilliantly, and leaned over to brush her lips across Hermione's cheek. Hermione flushed and looked away, but she was smiling. Squeezing Luna's hand, she leaned forward, trying to conceal the fact that her throat felt strangely tight.

Aimlessly, she reached for a large, solid book on the bottom shelf, let it tip forward into her lap, and stared at it. Saelanunge Gerecednessa. Old English. It took a moment for Hermione to parse it; although she had taken several classes in it because there were some spells—especially very old spells—that were not Latinate in origin. They tended to be less well known and therefore an excellent trick to have up one's sleeve. Besides which, she'd been curious.

Tales of Binding.

"That's it." Luna was leaning over her shoulder; her breasts against Hermione's back were almost inexpressibly soft, and it took Hermione far too long to succeed in parsing what she'd said. She automatically followed Luna's gaze towards the intricate Celtic knot on the front cover of the book. "What?"

"Sailboats. I can't believe it. I mean, I suppose I can see how my brain made the connection, but it's still rather funny, isn't it? Do you know what it means?"

"Tales of Binding," Hermione supplied. "Wait, you mean this is the book?"

"Let me see it." Luna flipped it open, and, unusually cooperatively for a Restricted Section book, it lay quiescent as she turned page after yellowing page. "Yes," she breathed, after a moment. "Yes, yes—this. Here." Triumphantly, she pointed to an illustration with what looked like a coffee-cup stain in the corner. It was one of those sort of woodcut-esque drawings, with a lot of diagonal lines for shading that made the ring of dark stones stand out darkly from the page. "This is what I found," Luna said with a shudder.

Hermione squinted at the crabbed handwriting on the obverse page, trying to make it out. Poor handwriting and a language she wasn't used to reading. "This is going to take a while to transcribe," she frowned. "And I need some better lighting."

By the flickering torchlight deep in the Reserved Section, she could barely make out the letters.

"Why don't we go to the lounge?" Luna suggested. "Once we've translated it, we can tell Harry and Draco what they're looking for."

Hermione nodded. "The last I heard, they were still poking around the general area and hadn't found anything, but it's been quite some time since they last reported to us." She frowned. "I hope they're all right," she said quietly.

Luna put a comforting hand on her arm. "I'm sure they are. Harry can be a little scatterbrained at times." She tipped her head to the side in a smile. Hermione smiled back as she picked up Tales of Binding and got to her feet.

Teysa refused to tell them how she'd gotten into Professor Potter's office, which made Ral suspect whatever she'd done was probably illegal and therefore fascinating, but either way, she and Ral had gotten back at roughly the same time, and all Ral had had to do was bum around the Forbidden Forest until Mirko showed up. Which hadn't taken long. He thought the boggart got lonely out there sometimes, and he felt bad that he hadn't visited them this year, but with everything that was going on with Jace, he just hadn't felt up to it.

Without a way to talk to them—without Jace, he admitted grudgingly—it was harder to know if Mirko would understand what he wanted. There was just the chill of their breath and the sense of uneasiness they always brought. The blurred grey figure rising from the mist shimmered and took on Jace's form—something Mirko was always pretty comfortable with, ever since their first year—and Ral had to suppress a sudden stabbing pain in his throat.

Mirko's eyes, blank and blue and just too large for the real Jace, stared implacably at Ral for a long moment, and then they held out one pale, misty hand in the direction of Hogwarts. Let's go, they seemed to be saying. The journey back was short but silent, awkward because Ral didn't think he'd ever been alone with Mirko before.

Talking to them via the pensieve instead of directly through Jace's mind was more difficult, and made Ral think vaguely of the His Dark Materials trilogy. The way disjointed images and symbols bubbled to the surface for interpretation was similar to the way he'd always imagined Lyra reading the alethiometer. Except that none of the three of them had an innate talent for it, because the person who had the innate talent for talking to Mirko was the person they were trying to rescue.

Eventually, though, Mirko had nodded, which probably meant they understood what Ral, Teysa, and Chandra were trying to tell them, and faded out into a grayish mist that trickled out the door. Good timing, too, because this was generally around the time that Emmara showed up somewhere vaguely on the fourth floor and then vanished.

Ral was now sort of trying to focus on homework, and pretty much failing—this essay was going to be incomprehensible even by his usual standards—while Chandra wasn't bothering to even try, and was, instead, amusing herself by trying to make what looked like fire rings in the air. Teysa, apparently more patient than either of them, was calmly ensconced in a book nearly as large as she was.

Several minutes later, the grey mist boiled up again from underneath the door and formed into a pillar, which rapidly became a vaguely Jace-esque figure again. It was smiling, which Ral cautiously took to be a good sign. Mirko wasn't great at human facial expressions, but they usually weren't totally off either. A smile was probably some kind of positive.

Mirko floated over to the pensieve, and Teysa, Ral, and Chandra crowded eagerly around it. "Don't elbow me," Ral said irritably.

"Then let me see," Chandra responded, but both of them fell silent as the images began to form.

It was the fourth floor, all right, built in miniature silver in the bowl in front of them. Dim, shadowy figures moved through it, and Ral watched intently for Emmara, though he wasn't certain he'd be able to recognize her at this level of resolution. Slowly, the picture panned along an empty stretch of wall between two pictures. Instead of continuing, as Ral had expected, it paused. Then the silver bricks of the wall seemed to slide backwards like so many Tetris blocks, revealing a sturdy wooden door with an ornate handle that, for some reason, looked very vaguely familiar.

"But that door doesn't exist," Chandra pointed out, in a puzzled tone of voice. "What're they trying to tell us?"

Ral frowned. "It looks familiar," he said. "But I think you're right, isn't there just wall there? Mirko, are you sure this thing is doing what you want it to?"

The blurred pale face turned slowly from the pensieve and then back to Ral, and the boggart gave a single, deep nod.

"Maybe you're wrong?" Teysa suggested. "Perhaps it's a hidden door—it could be concealed by an illusion, or even something as simple as a tapestry."

"I guess…" Ral said doubtfully. That didn't seem likely, but he supposed it was possible. "We might as well go look for it."

"Yeah," Chandra agreed. "Look, if she's as powerful as you think she is, maybe she, I don't know, created a new door or something, and then hid it."

Ral considered this. It seemed like you'd have to go to an awful lot of trouble to do something like that without the staff finding out. On second thought, absolutely no one had noticed or believed him about what she'd done to Jace, so maybe it wasn't so unbelievable after all. "Yeah, let's go," he agreed.

The three of them made their way up silently to the fourth floor corridor. Ral was shaking with suppressed nerves, and every so often, a tiny spark formed on his pinky finger and shot towards the ground. All I want to do, he thought angrily, is find out what she's doing and stop her. And maybe get a thank you from Jace. A thank you would be nice.

Or maybe—maybe he could get Jace to look at him the way he'd looked during the few hours they'd worked together in the lab a week ago, that soft, almost hesitant look and the way Jace's mouth suddenly turned up into an excited grin, the way his lips—fuck. I am not in love with my best friend.

Whatever. It didn't matter. He just had to get to get him back. Help him. That was the only thing that was important right now, find out what Emmara had been doing to him and how they could fix it.

He barely noticed the stairs going past and was almost surprised when they reached the stretch of wall that Mirko had indicated. Unsurprisingly, it was blank. Ral sighed. Now they had to figure out how to find the door the boggart had showed them—but Mirko was continuing past the wall for some reason. "Uh, hey, Mirko?" Ral said uncertainly. "Wasn't it here?"

The blurred Jace-head swiveled a disconcertingly large angle around and nodded. Simultaneously, Mirko raised one backwards hand and beckoned at them. This was weird, but the boggart was still the best lead they had, so, with a shrug, Ral followed them. They got to the end of the passage and turned back. "Seriously, what're they doing?" Chandra hissed as they followed it right back down the corridor again.

"Be patient," Teysa said crisply. "Quite a number of spells require repetition."

Chandra made a grumbling noise, but subsided. Ral would have liked to complain as well, too nervous and on-edge to want to just keep walking aimlessly back and forth, but he wasn't going to say anything after Chandra already had.

Reaching the other end of the hallway and turning around again, they walked back yet again—and then Mirko stopped in front of that same damn patch of wall. Except somehow it wasn't empty anymore. Ral blinked. Teysa had been right. Instead of the same boring, uniform paneling between two large portraits, there was now a door slotted snugly into the wall, the same door they'd seen in the pensieve, the same door that seemed so oddly familiar to Ral, if he could only place it.

But this was it. This was the closest they'd been yet. With a sense of mounting triumph, Ral reached out and tried the doorknob. There was a soft creak, and then it swung inward.

Things were awkward again. The previous night, Ron had apologized as stiffly as humanly possible to both of them, staring at something over Harry's left ear when he did, and curling up in his sleeping bag on the floor with his back pressed against the wall.

"Oh, for Merlin's sake," Draco said loudly. "Weasley, I wouldn't want your arse if it was the last arse in the bloody universe, all right?"

Ron went red to his ears and glared, but he eased away from the wall a little. By the following day, he was at least back to making eye contact with Harry, although Harry noticed that he still stayed maybe an arms' length farther away than he normally did. But if this was his rate of getting okay with the situation, as long as it kept up, it wouldn't be that bad, Harry supposed. In a month or two, things might even be back to normal again.

They had waited until the afternoon to go back to the stones they'd found, mostly because Draco was still moving stiffly and a little painfully in the morning, and Harry didn't want him to strain himself, so he'd contrived to think up a lot of small excuses to keep them around the bedroom until it was relatively late. He wasn't sure if Draco had tumbled to his game or not; Ron certainly hadn't and was just getting more and more impatient.

Now, though, they were heading up the old tor for the second time. There was still a chilly dankness settled across it, at stark odds with what was actually a surprisingly sunny day. "Why don't you let me do the spells this time, Potter?" Draco suggested acerbically.

"You can probably call me Harry," Harry pointed out mildly. "You were certainly yelling it loud enough yesterday."

There was a sudden silence, and Harry watched in amusement as both Ron and Draco slowly turned red.

"Harry then," Draco said shortly, digging his wand out of his robes. "Either way, I don't need you setting off another ancient curse and getting us all incinerated or turned into frogs or something equally nasty."

His approach was similar to what Harry's had been on the previous day, except that he threw in one or two charms in what Harry thought was probably Gaelic, but the rapidity of his speech and the harshness of his accent made it difficult to tell. Harry had never had much experience with Gaelic anyways.

He could still sense the darkness in the air, and the sensation actually grew worse as Draco carefully moved from spell to spell, until finally, he paused with a sigh. "Of course," he said.

"What is it?" Ron asked.

"The spell Harry tripped yesterday seems to have been the last protection round this place. Now there are just traces."

Taking out his wand, Harry quickly performed his own spell, the spell that had ended so disastrously on the previous day. "You're right," he said. "Just traces of dark magic. But some of it's recent—well, relatively recent." And he thought he recognized the signature, too, though it would have to be a good decade old or so.

"Some is very old, though." Draco frowned. "There's something familiar about it."

"I think some of the newer stuff may have been Bellatrix Lestrange," Harry said, and Draco nodded slowly.

"It's her style, all right. A large amount of power pumped through to break an ancient spell. Very careless. And I think at least one person died here then, though I can't be certain. Not on land with a dark spell this old on it—it's soaked into the bones of the place."

Frowning, Draco chewed on his knuckle. "So, suppose this place was raided by Voldemort's lackeys during the war. The spell was broken, and something was taken out of the earth—perhaps an artifact?"

"They could have been doing so many things," Harry shrugged. "I'm sure there are still Death-Eaters walking around free."

Draco gave him a sardonic smile. "Some people would say there was one right here."

He glanced in Ron's direction, but Ron didn't exactly rise to the bait. "So you don't know what it was, then, mate?"

"I don't know what it was, but if you just give me a minute—I could swear I've seen something like this before. Ugh, it's a pity we don't have a pensieve."

"We could go back to Hogwarts," Harry pointed out.

"No—I don't think it's actually necessary." Draco frowned, then snapped his fingers. "I've got it. Father once took me to one of Voldemort's boltholes in France—"

"Oh, those." Harry blew out an explosive breath. In the years following the war, they'd discovered that, although most of Voldemort's followers were British, he had several strongholds in other countries; the most numerous, of course, being directly across the Channel.

"They had someone imprisoned there," Draco said slowly. "She was under heavy guard, and I wasn't allowed to get very close. All Father said was that she had the potential to be a powerful ally if she could be convinced to aid us."

"I take it she wasn't convinced," Harry said dryly, "or we'd know a bit more about what was going on right now. Maybe we'd better look into this French bolthole, then."

"I'd love to, but I don't exactly have my passport on me," Draco responded, with a frustrated sigh.

"Well, then," Ron broke in. "Good thing you've got a practicing Auror with you, isn't it?" He gave them a grim smile as they turned to him. "This is definitely enough proof to constitute at least a minor emergency. I can get us in through the international floo network."

The Sleeper in Stone, Hermione read slowly, paying little attention to the cup of tea at her elbow, and just a bit more to Luna's hand, brushing lightly against her knuckles. Even tucked into a large number of blankets in her own room, curled up against her new girlfriend, and with a steaming cup of tea that smelled lovely, she was shivering, tired, and apprehensive. And Tales of Binding wasn't exactly easy reading material. Hermione's Gaelic was rusty, and the handwriting was scrawled and hasty, which, combined with a relatively odd word-choice and the author's evident desire to be poetic but lack of particular talent, made it really difficult going.

Upon then through darkness blinding spake Merlin—she had to be translating some of that wrong, but never mind, Hermione thought with a shake of her head.

You viper, you whom I held to my breast

Who has poisoned my veins in my sleep

A rose with too-hidden thorn

Now shall you too sleep.

Too long your honeyed words have lulled me

The stinking rot of your false love

Clouding my mind with a miasma.

Kill you I cannot, but sleep you shall.

"Are you sure it's 'miasma'?" Luna ventured. "Or, well, maybe you're right, but what do you think the author means by that?"

Hermione frowned at the page. "It looks like he's talking about a love potion," she pointed out. "Smell's a pretty good indicator, and that would definitely cloud your thoughts. A love potion that affected Merlin himself would have to be pretty strong, though."

"Well, there are all those stories about Nimue," Luna said dreamily. "My da used to read me some of them when I was little."

"Most wizards don't think they have much truth to them." Hermione shifted, frowning. "But then, I suppose we don't know how accurate this story is either."

Luna ran her fingers across the image of the standing stones opposite to the text. "This is what I saw, though," she murmured. "The earth was churned up, but the ring of stones was just the same."

"Hmmm." It was still difficult to think beneath the haze of exhaustion—Hermione wondered if she was getting sick. But something was niggling at her. "Did they have love potions in Merlin's time?" There had been charms, she was sure of that. But, frustratingly—and she ought to know this, she was teaching History of Magic, for Merlin's sake—she couldn't quite put her finger on the appropriate range of dates for the first love potions.

"Accio Weatherby," she murmured, summoning his treatise, Mind-altering Magic Through the Ages. It was a good reference volume that wasn't so in-depth she thought she'd have trouble finding what she needed. "Hmmm. It looks as if they did. Liliana Vess is older than I thought she was."

"Liliana Vess?"

"Supposedly the inventor of the first love potion. Not much is known about her other than old stories. We don't even really have reliable dates for her. She could have overlapped Merlin; she could also have been a few centuries earlier." Hermione shook her head. There was simply no reason that the history of this era should be so sporadic. Perhaps everyone had been busy hiding from Muggles, she thought exasperatedly, although that really didn't explain much. Well, history of magic wasn't really her area of expertise; it was just where she was most needed as a teacher.

The fire flared green, startling Hermione out of her reverie.

"Hermione." Harry's head looked grim. "We've got a situation."

"You found the stones?"

"Oh, yeah, we found them. Draco followed the dark magic trace there and brought us to France—by the way, that's why I didn't just floo back entirely, we're still here—and to one of Voldemort's old hideaways. He says there was someone kept here during the war, someone Voldemort was hoping to convince to fight on his side."

Hermione's stomach was suddenly queasy. "Not someone we'd have wanted fighting on his side, I take it?"

"No," Harry said shortly. "Whoever she is, she's a bloody dark witch. And we found the spot—took us long enough, there was an absolute maze of befuddlement charms around it. We finally managed to track down one of the locals—a squib—who remembered a tour group that came through quite late one night and went right into what everyone thought were abandoned ruins. He remembered that there was a woman with white hair and a boy with a blue cloak who went in. He thinks they came out escorting another young woman."

"Oh no," Hermione whispered.

The room Ral, Teysa, and Chandra had entered looked like an alchemical laboratory, complete with several heavy oaken cabinets, and a huge iron cauldron that looked as if it was probably big enough to fit a person. Teysa had immediately limped over to it and looked inside before pronouncing that it was empty, somewhat to Ral's relief. Something about the hulking sides and the weird, knotted designs on its side turned his stomach. In fact, the whole room felt—dark. There was a strange dimness hanging over everything.

"Somebody's been doing dark magic in here," Teysa said, sounding slightly uneasy.

"How do you know?" Ral asked, even though the hair was prickling at the back of his neck.

"I know what it feels like." Teysa pursed her lips together, one hand clenching in the robes over her injured leg. "Let's check around for any clues in the cabinets and then leave. I'd rather not stay here any longer than I have to."

The first cabinet wouldn't open, not even to alohomora. Teysa warned them away from the second one. "We can come back later, but I want to have a good anti-curse book right at hand before we try anything with that." She jabbed a finger at the complex rune inscribed across the front of the second cabinet. "That could be very nasty if we aren't very careful."

The third cabinet, however, was less carefully sealed. The door shuddered and creaked when Ral cast the unlocking charm on it, though it didn't quite open.

"The hinges," Teysa said suddenly, narrowing her eyes. "They're not properly reinforced. We can probably just destroy them, if we can—"

"Incendio." A cylinder of flame blossomed from the end of Chandra's wand, and Ral felt the heat of it on his arm as it went past. The hinges tried to maintain cohesion, but they were old and poorly made, and apparently Chandra's fire was very hot.

"Nice," Ral said appreciatively as the metal glowed red, then white, and then finally melted, trickling down the side of the apparently magically-protected wood. That probably didn't make sense, and somewhere in a side corner of his brain, Ral made a note to look more carefully into fire protection spells and how they interacted with normal critical points. Were there magical phase transitions in addition to the normal ones?

And then the front of the cabinet was sagging off, and all thoughts of science were forgotten, because—"Oh my god. Kallist."

What had she done to him? The little cloud hung in the center of the ruined cabinet, nothing more than a puff of eerily unmoving grey mist. Hands shaking, Ral reached into the cabinet and gently prodded the cloud. It felt cold and oddly dry to the touch; his finger passed through it without any noticeable effect. "Kallist, mate, c'mon," he murmured. "Can you hear me?"

No response. Sickness churned in Ral's stomach, the way it had last summer when Niv had gotten into Ral's dad's chocolate stash. But he'd been okay, they'd taken him to the vet—there weren't any vets for clouds, Ral thought stupidly. Carefully, he got out his wand and looked from it to Kallist. Would conjuring a spark help?

A cold presence at his elbow drew his attention back to Mirko, who was staring into the cabinet as well. Maybe he'd know what to do—they were both amortals, after all, so he'd have a better chance of knowing something useful than Ral would. Or maybe—he didn't want to get one of the professors, but Tamiyo at least should have a better grasp than Ral himself did. Chewing on his lip, he tried to decide if it made more sense to leave for now and come back, or to stay and try to solve it themselves. He hated to ask for help, and he hated the idea of leaving—they might not be able to find it again easily—but Kallist was too important to gamble the wrong way on. So was Jace.

"Hey, Teysa—" She'd have a better feel for this than Chandra would, probably.

"Riddikulus!" There was a sudden, sharp crack, and Mirko gave a sudden croaking, screaming cry. As Ral whirled with his wand in his hand, the boggart exploded into a handful of wisps of grey mist, which dissipated into the surrounding air. Maybe it was the sudden dull thump of pain at the sight of his friend imploding, but whatever it was, when he tried to bring his wand to bear, he was just a moment too late to avoid it when the second voice shouted, "Expelliarmus!"

Ral's wand went flying out of his hand amid an explosion of sparks. He twisted around, trying to recover it, but it clattered to the floor halfway across the room.

"Incendi—" Chandra's voice was arrested in the middle of the spell she was trying to cast, and Ral turned around and then dove to the side to avoid a red bolt as someone yelled, "Stupefy!"

He hit the ground hard and rolled, scrambling to the other side of the cabinet he'd found Kallist in. His wand was only a few feet away from him, if he could just—

A foot came down on top of it, and Ral found himself staring at Jace as the latter bent and retrieved his wand.

"Jace, what the fuck are you doing?"

His friend stared at him and seemed to look right through him, a wide, dizzy smile plastered across his face. He raised his wand. "Don't move," he said. "Emmara?"

She came around the side of the cabinet, barely even a hair out of place.

"Well, whatever shall we do with you, hm, Ral Zarek?" The stupid-sounding French accent was gone, replaced by a different lilt that sounded almost like Elspeth's. Not quite. "I'm very tired of you causing me this much trouble all the time."

"Jace," Ral said steadily, ignoring her. "Give me back my wand."

The blue eyes blinked very slowly. "I don't think I should," Jace said finally, his voice sounding as if it was drenched in molasses. Emmara shot him an irritated look.

"Oh, be quiet, Jace," she said, and Jace shut his mouth immediately. "That's a darling boy," she continued, and he smiled dreamily.

"What did you do to him?" Ral snarled, starting forward. Fuck it, he didn't need a wand, he'd punch that smug grin right off her face. He felt something sizzling in the air around his fist, forming a tight corona that set the hair on the back of his wrist rising—

Emmara snarled something in a language he didn't recognize, and something hit Ral very hard in the region of his chest. He doubled over, gasping, but his lungs couldn't seem to get any air.

"You're just aching for a lesson, aren't you, boy?" Something sharp beneath his chin forced his head up.

"Jace—won't let you—do anything to me," Ral forced out through painfully constricted lungs.

"Your precious Jace is so full of Amortentia that his heart would give out if he had another drop," Emmara responded, her eyes glittering darkly. "He won't do a damn thing for you. And when it's over, I'll tell him to erase the memory, so he doesn't have to dream of you screaming until your lungs run out of air."

"You fucking bitch—" Tingling surged up his arm, and he could feel it trying to break loose, but before it could, the wand jerked up beneath his throat.

"Crucio."